Earlier this week, YouTuber Josh Pieters released a 47-minute documentary that followed 23-year-old OnlyFans star Lily Phillips as she planned her goal of having sex with 100 men in 24 hours as a stunt for her OnlyFans page and achieved.

While she’s certainly not the first woman to achieve these numbers (in 2004, Lisa Sparks broke the world record by sleeping 919 in one day), it’s still a grueling feat that required months of planning and a team of assistants. Any sex worker can tell you that getting 100 men to upload their IDs for verification is a task in itself.

Since announcing the project earlier this fall, Phillips has faced online harassment and pushback from civilians and other OnlyFans cast members alike, who have accused her of being morally bankrupt, attention-seeking and insecure. The show itself, which follows her journey from the naive excitement of her fantasy project to the tearful exhaustion of its completion, has sparked an online discourse about the porn industry and its impact on the lives of young women.

As a long-time sex worker in various sectors of the industry, I know from experience that we tend to hold back because we fear that sharing information about our working lives that is not entirely positive will be used against us could Those who expect the abolition of our industry – a standard that workers in other industries are not required to meet. Her tears are political and controversial in this regard. But should they be?

One of the documentary’s strengths is the attention Pieters pays to the work behind the scenes of each sexual transaction and the respect shown to Phillips as a successful businesswoman. We get a tour of her toy closet; we are told about their complex win/loss tables; We follow her as she shops for the big day (noting that her lingerie purchases are tax deductible); and we watch as an overwhelming number of notifications appear on their phone from men applying to take part in the experience. (It should be noted that the film is entirely SFW, even blurring images of sex toys and omitting any word that suggests sexual intercourse – the video of the act itself is only available behind a paywall on Phillips’ OnlyFans page .)

While she self-deprecatingly calls herself a slut throughout the documentary, she also makes it clear that what she does is work. “I do (porn) because I enjoy it,” she says. “I’ve always just felt empowered by the fact that I’m making money doing something that all guys would do anyway; All the boys are going to sexualize me anyway.” While Pieters responds kindly and perhaps naively, “Not all men…”, Phillips remains steadfast in the refrain I’ve heard from many sex workers (and sometimes said myself): The sexual one Objectification of our bodies is something we can only benefit from if we are willing to live under the public scrutiny this choice creates.

Phillips is certainly aware that living under stigma is the price she pays for the astronomical amount of money she earns (a number so high that both Phillips and Pieters are ashamed to say it out loud) and the “Empowerment” she feels. “Everyone is praying for your demise,” she says in a particularly honest moment. She opens up about having her looks and life choices picked apart by an audience of online trolls, saying: “Nobody likes what you do and everyone just thinks less of you.”

Still, Phillips approaches the experience with a smile on his face. “I don’t think people realize how happy this makes me,” she says. She alludes several times to having sex with 100 men in a single day as a fantasy of hers, although she doesn’t say exactly what the fantasy is: the actual sex, the challenge, the money, the attention? It seems plausible that it could be any or all of these things, or something else entirely. This is, after all, a trick that falls into a broader context of both the history of pornography and the culture of online content creation. (Would MrBeast be worth half a billion dollars if he didn’t constantly up the ante?) Pulling off a stunt of this magnitude and taking an audience with him is certainly a way to stand out from the competition on OnlyFans.

On November 18, 2024, Phillips exceeded her goal of having sex with 100 men in one day (she reached 101), but admitted it was harder than she expected. The documentary ends with a post-coital interview with Phillips, a section of the video that has garnered a lot of negative attention on social media. In it she tearfully comments: “I don’t know if I recommend it (having sex with 100 men in one day).” When Pieters asks her if she’s had time to process the experience, she replies: “Not yet, but I won’t forget this day. Jesus.”

Pieters ends the film with a candid statement: “Perhaps that night we just saw someone overcome with emotion after overcoming such a monumental challenge.” Or perhaps we saw the toll this career truly takes on a person can mean.” As someone who has worked in the sex industry for 10 years and had other careers before that, I’m more inclined to read it first. And yet, it’s that second possibility that so many people across the internet (including in the comments on the YouTube video itself) have been clinging to, especially since she announced that she plans to break the Sparks record next spring by has sex with 1,000 men within 24 hours. Fornication and the stigma of sex work are so pervasive that it’s easy to blame the sex industry for the potential harm this stunt has caused her, but she is an adult who works independently and can make her own decisions about how she looks after her own body uses and how she uses them If she assumes otherwise, she undermines her autonomy.

OnlyFans models are independent YouTubers who run their businesses largely on their own terms. This story made headlines precisely because it was not industry standard – in particular, much was made of the fact that it left STI testing up to individuals (the document states that it gave priority to participants who provided medical documentation) and that she seemed surprised when Pieters told her that HIV could be transmitted through ejaculate in the mouth. And it’s true, she violated industry precautions: she didn’t let any of the participants take STI tests through the UK version of our PASS system, she used condoms for vaginal sex but not for oral sex. She didn’t conduct background checks like escorts would when sleeping with civilians, she didn’t let participants shower beforehand, and she used an Airbnb, even though doing so could well get her banned from the service. If anything, this reveals their youth and inexperience and what happens when content creators eschew the decades of trial and error that go into setting standards for such heavily regulated industries.

The entire ordeal was put together in a somewhat haphazard manner that seemed to befit her age and experience. Even though her team consisted of nine people, things didn’t go smoothly: Phillips and her team were late, men dropped out at the last minute, and everything took longer than expected. But anyone who has directed a large production (a conference, an event, a party, a gangbang) can tell you that there are always things you have to improvise at the last minute – especially if it’s your first time . Most of us who work in the sex industry learn through work to manage client expectations, our own emotions, logistics, and money. But that’s true for most jobs.

Sex workers often talk about how one of the hardest things about their job is that we have to constantly demonstrate happiness and fulfillment so we aren’t judged harshly for our decisions. In my area of ​​the industry (full-service, in-person), there are only two tropes: the run-down worker or the “happy hooker.” Sex workers have no space to express ambivalence or complex feelings about their work. When anti-porn feminists and conservative Christians are both working hard to shut down our industry, we loathe being honest when we’re having a bad day on the job because we fear that information will be used as ammunition.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing Phillips did in this film wasn’t have sex with 100 men, but rather break the fourth wall and allow people outside the industry to recognize her vulnerability and complex feelings about her work. She allowed us to see how she learned on the job and how she processed her feelings about it, while also asking people to recognize her humanity and agency. Perhaps by going to extremes, she showed the world how difficult and nuanced this profession really is. Maybe more of us should be brutally honest about the complexities of our jobs.